What is Scran?

Scran aims to provide educational access to digital materials representing our material culture and history. We host images, movies and sounds from museums, galleries, archives and the media and we are one of the largest educational online services in the UK supporting thousands of schools, libraries, colleges and universities.

We work in partnership with over 300 cultural institutions in Scotland and the rest of the UK. A number of institutions use our online solution - Scran-in-a-Box - to provide access to their own data. Scran is funded through grant aid from the Scottish Government, subscriptions and sales of services.

Our History

Scran was conceived in 1995 and The Scran Trust - a registered charity - was formed shortly after. Its founding partners were The National Museums Scotland, The Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland, the former Scottish Museums Council, now Museums Galleries Scotland and, by invitation, the Scottish Consultative Council on the Curriculum.

Scran is now a service of the Scottish charity Historic Environment Scotland.

In its first five years, it engaged in a wide ranging scheme of grant awards which allowed cultural organisations to digitise parts of their collections to be made available for educational purposes. This was Millennium Commission funded through the UK Lottery. It developed an advanced licensing system which was commended by many in which the institution retained ownership of the digitised assets but made these available under licence to Scran. There followed further large grant aid partner projects with NOF Digitise funding through the National Library of Scotland.

Over the years Scran has received awards including: Silver MUSE from the American Association of Museums (AAM), 'In recognition of the Highest Standards of Excellence in the use of Media and Technology…'. The ‘Jason Farradane’ award of the Institute of Information Scientists as "an outstanding piece of work in the Information Field". Scran was also listed as one of the top ten NGfL sites in the BECTa/Guardian Awards, one of the Top Ten Online Museums in the world by The Guardian newspaper, Scottish Museum of the Year award for multimedia, British Archaeological Society / Channel 4 award for multimedia.

Technical Details

Scran utilises open source software and runs on a cluster server configuration with MySQL and PHP under Linux. The searchable database is over 1.5Gb and total storage including all assets is over 4Tb. Sixty additional websites are hosted as linked services.

Logos & Search Box

Scran logos and graphics - Scran graphics for you to download. Credit Scran and meet copyright licence requirements when using Scran in digital or paper resources. The logo is our registered trademark and you must seek our prior permission for any other use.